Some questions have come up in the French localization of Zik Clock, and while it’s too late to incorporate their answers into the imminent release, I thought discussing them here might work better than in the ULP translation comments that most people probably don’t even see unless they specifically go looking for them.

My French is pretty rudimentary, so there’s little point in discussing these things with me – I’m posting this on behalf of the French localizers who I hope will join the discussion. (So feel free to discuss in French, I have no problem reading it, just writing it takes too much time.)

What’s the usual term that French-speaking players use for the portals in the pods? (I don’t think they’re ever named in the game, so there’s no use checking the French localization of Uru.) Current suggestions are “spirale” and “portail”.

There was also some confusion about capitalization, but I think that one is solved now – I’m still mentioning it for completeness. In general, for button (and other UI element) labels, only the first letter seems to be capitalized on iOS in French, not the first letter of each word (some examples from the built-in Settings app: “Service de localisation”, “Sonnerie et alertes”, “Réglage automatique”, “Créer un compte”). I think the consensus is that this is the correct way. Suggestions with more words capitalized kept coming up, but it appears the translators were just blindly following the capitalization of the English source string there.

I am french, but I don't play Uru in french at all, nor do I read much of the french Uru forums. Still, for what my opinion is worth:Pods portals : the translation would be 'portail' but a quick browse of french Uru forums reveals they use more often the word 'spirale'.“calibration” or “calibrage” : both are correct; but "calibrage" is slight more commonly used. About capitalization: that sounds good to me; you don't capitalize every word in french; even for such uses.

I play the game in english but when I'm talking to a french-speaking explorer, I will always use: "J'attends le portail de Negilahn" ("I'm waiting for Negilahn Portal") for example. I never heard of such word like "spirale". I would tend to use the word "portail" as it will be understand very well by all french-speakers.

In french, the rule is to capitalise only the first letter of the first word unless you are referring to a proper name. Let me put down some examples:

"Les quêtes d'Annabelle" - here "Le" follows then common and only right usage of capitalised letter in french apart from proper names, "Annabelle" follow the usage for proper names. "quêtes" stands for quests which is a common word.

"Ouvrir un compte" - here they are all common words so only the first one has a capitalised first letter.

Suggestions coming from "translators" who are capitalising all letters are blindly following English language and shouldn't not be taken seriously. I will stand against anyone who will try to lower down the french translation in any way. Even though, I won't play the game in french.